August 11, 2010 – We can’t take credit for this graphic; the amazing people atPPCBlog get that honor. What we can do is link you to their work and explain why it’s important to your law firm’s website.

This is only a tiny version of the upper half!

First off, take a peek at the Google Graphic, a super-huge image file that explains in a handy flow chart how Google searches work (for now at least!). Don’t worry, it pops up in a new window so you don’t lose us here. Give yourself a few moments to really scroll through. You may even want to bookmark it for later when you’re working on new ideas for your website.

Now that you’ve gotten a glimpse into how Google searches work, you may be wondering why this is so important to you. Chances are you don’t handle your own SEO methods; you more-than-likely leave that up to a webmaster or your marketing person. But if you write your own blogs or the occasional article, you need to be aware of the impact your content has on Google’s search spiders (called bots on the graphic).

That very first box at the top of the flow chart-the “you”-is really YOU! Every time you post an update to your blog, add a new article to your library, or any other content to your law firm’s website, you are starting the whole chain of events below. Did you ever realize you had that much power over Google?

Notice that the actual search is not performed until halfway down the flow chart? Google puts your website through that many tests and analyses before it’s even considered as a part of its search results. Even after the client enters their search terms, there’s a whole bottom half of flow chart steps that Google runs through to return their results.

Isn’t it amazing that all of this happens in less than 1 second and billions of times a day?